Nvidia tech demo: destroy everything you touch

Oh, tech demos! So fancy, so shiny, and so unlike any game we'll get to play for years. So come, watch Nvidia's new demo of smashing an amphitheatre to dynamic pieces in real-time, shown at the Game Developers Conference this week, and dream of all the games based upon this which won't get made.

Oh, tech demos! So fancy, so shiny, and so unlike any game we'll get to play for years. So come, watch Nvidia's new demo of smashing an amphitheatre to dynamic pieces in real-time, shown at the Game Developers Conference this week, and dream of all the games based upon this which won't get made.

The demo sees a lovely tidy arena slowly demolished with clicks, fracturing into dynamically-created pieces--not preset chunks like in Battlefield 3 or Red Faction: Guerrilla. Dust sprinkles down nicely, and it's all very pretty, though the simulation isn't quite complete.

"Structures do not collapse under their own weight at the moment but we will soon have this so stay tuned..." Matthias Müller-Fischer, Nvidia Switzerland's lead PhysX SDK researcher, explained in a YouTube comment.

The demo's running in real time at 30fps on a single GeForce GTX 680, a $500 graphics card. Of course, if you were to throw in AI, complete art assets, sound, and all the other parts of a game, it'd be running far slower. It is only a techo demo, after all. But destruction! Bang!